For evidence of this look no further than a survey by the National Association for Law Placement, which found that in the biggest legal markets the going rate for first-years was still at its prerecession high of $160,000 a year.
In Philadelphia, where law salaries are slightly lower than in New York, and Washington, and other top markets, the trend was the same. First-year salaries at big firms were unchanged from 2007, before the start of the Great Recession, ranging this year from a low of $125,000 to a high of $145,000.
"The real story on associate salaries is that they have been largely flat during the recession," said James Leipold, executive director of Washington-based NALP, and a resident of Philadelphia's Fairmount section.
So is it safe to conclude that the big-law-firm model has come through unscathed after the worst downturn since the Great Depression.
Well, actually, no.
Associate salaries and other compensation metrics don't come close to telling the story of changes under way in big law, say many of the profession's sharpest observers.
Leipold and other experts point out that while many law firms struggled to maintain high salaries for associates for fear that salary cuts might be seen as an economic distress signal, they've been slashing costs in other ways.
The layoffs of administrative staff and associates - non-partner lawyers - got plenty of attention last year.
Less well-known is the outsourcing of work overseas, and the layoffs of so-called compensation partners, lawyers who have achieved partnership rank but do not share in the profits of the firm.
"What the firms did when the recession hit is they laid off a lot of associates, and they found ways to terminate a number of partners who they thought were not productive enough," said Robert Reinstein, former dean of Temple Law School and a constitutional law professor there.
